Disconnection (22 page)

(I will protect you)

I think nothing can protect me now
.

Sela worked on remaining calm as she turned around and began swimming in the other direction. Her fear of amputation, of sharp teeth digging into her guts, propelled her faster than she had ever moved before, water or land. Could she outswim an alligator? She did not know. But she would sure as hell try. She wished now that she knew something about alligators, other than that they were big ugly reptiles that had been around for zillions of years.

Note to self: Watch Crocodile Hunter as soon as I make it out of here. If I make it out of here
.

She could feel the reptile moving behind her, his snout leading the rest of him, his body darting through the water, coming closer to her inch by inch. Sela continued to move hysterically, until a long pair of arms reached into the water, pulling her to the surface. Before she knew what was happening, she was inside the motor boat, wrapped in Dean’s embrace.

“Are you crazy?” he screamed. “What are you thinking?” He looked like a mad demon in sacrificial war paint. Blood was still oozing from the wound Sela had delivered to his head. His eyes had turned the color of rotten limes.

Sela fought him, but Dean’s grip was tight. His fingers scalded her flesh as she tried to force her way out of his grip. “Don’t touch me!” she hollered. “Murderer! Murderer!
Murderer!”

Dean stared at her, shaking his head. “We’ll get to shore, Sela, then we can …”

“I won’t go anywhere with you.”

“Fuck, woman, did you not notice that an alligator was right behind you?”

Sela reached out and delivered another blow to his face, this time landing a hit to his eye. Dean swung back in defense, knocking Sela back into the water.

Like a rock she sank into the bayou headfirst. Water filtered through her nose and ears. Her scream went unheard as she managed to gain control of her senses. Blinded by the increasingly foggy water, Sela rose to the surface once more.

Dean hovered over the edge of the boat. His right eye was closed shut. He reached out his arm. “Come back, Sela. The alligator is right behind you. He’s sizing you up to see if you’re food,” he yelled, his voice betraying no sympathy for her plight.

What the hell would you know, you fucking murdering Yankee asshole, do they have alligators in Central Park, dipshit?

“Go to hell!” Sela spat out.

Dean stretched his hand farther out. “You have a choice. The alligator or me.”

“Fuck you!”

“You’ll have a better chance of survival with me, I assure you!”

I wouldn’t be too sure of that
.

Sela spotted the pirogue just a few feet away. If she was fast, she could just reach it. She started paddling with her arms. Seconds seemed like hours. A rough skin touched her foot as her hands reached to grab the pirogue’s side. The skin was not that of a human, Sela realized. Struggling to get into the pirogue, she felt a sudden change of air pressure touching the soles of her feet. When she turned, she saw the alligator was opening his mouth.

She screamed as she finally pushed her entire torso into the pirogue. She looked back as the alligator shuffled in the water, his horrible eyes watching her with the hunger known only by a hundred-year-old animal.

Sela had just a moment to catch her breath before she heard Dean’s motor start again. Peeling herself from the bottom of the pirogue, she could only watch helplessly as Dean pulled in beside her. He jumped out of the boat and grabbed onto her shirt with both hands. She could not escape him. Their struggle dragged both of them to the floor of the pirogue.

(I’ll protect you.)

Help me. I am going to die here
.

The pirogue rocked back and forth with Sela’s struggle. A hundred colors of light laminated the world around her as she fought her attacker.
Escape, escape, escape
, was the only clear thought she could muster.

Escape
.

Dear God, if you exist, I could sure use your help right now
.

“Sela, please listen …”

Hot, salty tears trickled from Sela’s eyes. She was about to give up, end the fight
(Resistance is futile.)
, when she saw the tackle box sitting near her left foot. Under Dean’s pinning crush, she was able to lift her leg just enough to angle her feet, pushing the box to where it was in reach of her hand.

Dean’s hand reached up to clench Sela’s face. They met eye to eye. “Listen to me,” he began, excitement forming drool at the side of his lip. “You need to know about Chloe and me.”

“No,” Sela sobbed. Her fingers found the box’s latch. When she finally managed to open the box, her fingers began a desperate search.

“Chloe does not mean anything to me,” Dean said through clenched teeth. “You’ve become my world, Sela. I mean that.”

Her thumb found what felt like the blade of the gutting knife. Carefully she lifted it from the box.

Dean continued, “Whatever was between Chloe and me …”

Sela did not let him finish. She reached over his back and slammed the knife so far into his arm that Dean fell forward in pain and shock, as his forehead hit Sela’s throat. She took Dean’s moment of shocked hesitation as an opportunity to drag her body out from under him.

“Shit! You crazy bitch!” Dean screamed. He was rolling on the floor like a fish out of water. He reached out and gripped Sela by the ankle, pulling her down again.

Sela slapped him with one bruised hand before rising from the pirogue’s bottom. But before she could jump to the other boat, she heard a familiar sound coming from the pirogue’s corner.

Chloe’s cell phone. It was ringing. It was ringing with that familiar tune, the one that Sela could never quite remember.

Up until now.

Led Zeppelin
.

Good Times, Bad Times

(You know I’ve had my share.)

Sela wanted to laugh. Led Zeppelin. Dean and Chloe’s password. The truth had been in front of her all along, and she had refused to see it.

She bent down and grabbed her purse, barely missing Dean’s hand reaching out to pull her down again. Dean screamed her name over and over as Sela jumped into the motor boat and started the engine, pulling away from the injured murderer and his plans to kill her.

Sela navigated to where she thought she and Dean had begun their bayou journey. When she reached land, she did not bother to look around to determine if she was on the right side of the shore. Events had turned her around, had made her lose all sense of direction. She was going by her own mental compass now, and that particular instrument had never been quite reliable. But she would survive. She would endure.

She tumbled out of the boat and started running. She worked at maintaining her breath as she ran. Her pace lightened as her feet moved over ground that was only slightly above sea level, where hardwoods added obstacles in her path, forcing her to zigzag while she ran.

Once she passed the Native American middens, her pace slowed. She could hear no sounds of someone following behind her, and for the first time in what seemed like forever her heart returned to an almost normal beat. Her legs were close to a semi-quick walk by the time she reached a road. She looked at her watch. Four p.m. Night was so close now, so close. The sun was just a sliver of pie over the land. If Sela wanted to make it back to New Orleans before nightfall, she would have to hitchhike.

She moved close to the road and stuck her thumb out. Trucks went by, followed by a handful of SUVs with fraternity stickers on the rear window, and an antique car with an Illinois license plate, but no one stopped until a black ’78 Cadillac that looked as if it had been rebuilt with parts from a junk lot slowed to a halt a few feet away from Sela.

The sun’s bright reflection against the glass made it impossible for Sela to see who was inside the car. She carefully moved closer to the vehicle. “Thank you for the ride,” she began. “I need to get back to New Orleans …”

The passenger door opened, revealing the driver.

The shaggy-bearded man from Frank’s Diner sat behind the wheel. Brown roaches crawled from his yellow eyes, and his voice whispered with the penetration of every evil. “The time for the redeemer is at hand.
Lmishema` ’aden shema`thak wak`an `ayni hazthak!”

Sela gasped and stepped back, the horrible sense of dread once again coagulating her blood stream. A voice inside her head pleaded for her to start running again, but her shocked gaze refused to leave the interior of the car, for it held at least a dozen animal corpses, ranging from chows to pythons, eagles and lizards, some of them stuffed and gutted, others with their intestines hanging out, their tongues poking from their mouths, their genitals laying in disarray along the car seat. A sawed-off head of a once-show material Himalayan cat rested near the safety brake and watched Sela with one dead blue eye jiggling out of its socket.

The stench took Sela’s breath away. She reeled over and vomited, the sickness pouring out in swift, sharp gags.

When she looked up, the man’s pupils had thinned to a sliver, like that of a snake, or alligator. He opened his mouth and his teeth began to fall out like skin from a leper. “GOD WILL JUDGE YOU NOW!” he screamed as Sela continued to back away. “THE TIME FOR THE REDEEMER IS AT HAND.
LMISHEMA’ ‘ADEN SHEMA ‘THAK WAK ‘AN ‘AYNI HAZTHAK!”

A gear switched in Sela’s head, the one labeled “Run like Hell.” Suddenly she was galloping away from the car and into the oncoming darkness.

I
t was one of those big gas stations where truck drivers could eat catfish and drink Coors while waiting for their massive eighteen wheelers to fill up. The front glass doors were greased with a million dirty handprints, but Sela hardly noticed as she opened the door and walked up to the front counter where an old codger in a faded denim jumpsuit was stacking Marlboros in the shelf above the register. His nametag read “Bud.”

“Excuse me, sir?”

Bud reached down from the cigarette display and looked Sela over carefully. When he saw her wet clothes, along with her messy hair, and the make-up on her face which Sela imagined by now was in different patches along her cheeks, Bud sighed deeply and asked, “Miss, you been smokin’ something you shouldn’t?” He lifted one bushy brow inquisitively.

“Sir?” Had she heard him right?

“What I’m askin’ is, have you been smokin’ some of them funny-colored cigarettes?”

Sela shook her head. “No, sir.”

Bud frowned. “I don’t believe that,” he said. “You look more beat-up than a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest.”

“I’m okay, really.”

“Jus’ checkin’. We get a lot of crazies out here. City folk with pink hair and such. You seen them people?”

“Yes, sir.”

Bud thoughtfully played with the whiskers on his chin and said, “Yep. Me, too. Rented a movie last night for my DVD player. The kid at the counter had hair that was sorta pink, sorta orange. Couldn’t tell which, though. How do you make your hair that color anyway?”

Sela ignored the man’s musings and asked, “Do you have a phone, sir?”

“Out back yonder. But you’ll have to call collect. The coin slot ain’t been right since a couple of them city folk came here and tore everything up. Say, you know a spiky, green haired feller, looks like a parrot that’s been flushed down the commode a few times?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, that’s who messed up the coin slot. No one saw him do it, but it ain’t been right since him and his hoodlum friends came here back in seventy-four.”

“I haven’t seen him. But if I do, I’ll be sure to let you know,” Sela offered.

Bud nodded and pointed to the front door. “Exit that way and turn left. It’s between the shitters.”

“Thank you.”

The air grew cooler as Sela walked around to the back of the gas station where the pay phone stood between the two restroom entrances, just as Bud had so eloquently suggested. She remembered with slight revulsion the Carrot Top collect call commercials on TV and proceeded to follow the commercial’s directions, dialing down the center. When the operator asked what number, Sela dialed Mandy’s, beginning with the area code. “Come on, Mandy,” she said aloud. “Pick up.”
For once, come through for me
.

The toilet flushed from inside the men’s bathroom. Sela apprehensively watched the door, fear rising in the pit of her stomach that it would be Dean who stepped out of the restroom. She breathed a sigh of relief when a truck driver walked out shaking his wet hands in the air. He wore a Rebel flag hat and stone-washed jeans, and he acknowledged Sela with a nod as he turned the corner.

The operator came on line, “The party you are seeking is not answering. Would you like to try another number?”

I don’t know another number, bitch!

And there was no phone book. Perhaps the green-headed kid had taken that too, back in seventy-four, and they had never bothered to replace it.

Sela thought of Detective Kline and wondered how she could contact him. After a pause, her fingers reached out and dialed 9-1-1. The operator came on, “9-1-1. What’s your emergency?”

“Hi, could you put me through to Detective Lewis Kline, please? He’s with the New Orleans Homicide division. I’m not sure of the precinct.”

“What is your emergency, ma’am?”

“I need to speak to Detective Kline, please. It’s urgent.”

“What is your location?”

“Don’t worry about my location.”

“We need a location, ma’am.”

“Fuck my location. Just get Detective Kline on the phone!”

“Ma’am, 911 is an emergency number, not a line for personal calls.”

“This is not a personal…”

The receiver clicked.

Sela slammed the phone down. She released a frustrated cry. Frantically she searched in her purse for something that could help her out of her predicament. Her hands came in contact with a card. She took it from its hiding place and examined it. Harold Applegate’s business card. Sela bit her lip in indecision. If she called, would he remember her?